Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:Essentially, the proximity of the two beans labelled for the querents' relationship, and the angle they fell at, would be the key to the divination. Ruggiero relates this to domestic relationships, how things occur in the household.

Exactly!

The impression one gets from these examples is that the cards were used like ‘beans’, this is, more like objects than like images.

EnriqueEnriquez wrote:* The Spanish word here is ‘espiráis’ which is the second-person plural for ‘espirar’. ‘Espirar’ means ‘to exhale’. I am taking the use of this word as a reference to the way we exhale air during our speech. The word may be referring to ‘talk to the living’. But I also could see word as signifying, in this context, ‘to inspire’ as in ‘to inspire the living’.

EnriqueEnriquez wrote:
Unless I am caught up with something, I will be more than happy to help you with any translation from Spanish if you aren’t picky with my English.

Thank you very much, you are bilingual and very generous. I'll never be "picky", but I do understand how difficult it is to translate from a mother-tongue into a second language, no matter how well mastered (not to compose, which draws only from one's own store of phrases, but to translate -that seems to be the most difficult of tests).

The first thing that came to mind was that these techniques are closer to the casting of lots than to what we understand as cartomancy. There are no assigned meanings for each card, nor means to activate any discerning narrative from them. This is, there is no storytelling, only the seek for omens.

I (almost) fully agree. I think this is how card divination should have developed. Like plucking daisy leaves for "he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not..."

All divination ultimately rests on omen-seeking, in response to a question. The other side is when something unusual happens and an omen is taken from it (like a comet or a monstrous birth). The sublety of interpretation, or the depth of the narrative, is a matter of degree rather than kind, in my opinion.

Where I disagree is only a subtlety as well - the definition of "narrative". I think that the proximity of certain images, and the intervening "interferences", would naturally produce narrative - along with the images of the court cards themselves, and including the nature of the suits - malevolent or beneficent. That is, I don't imagine Doña Maria just shuffled a pack of cards, had her client draw one, and then said "yes" or "no". Their meeting, the question, and the answer must have involved a narrative. And the cards that gave the answer must have elicited conversation - the narrative that probably "clarified" the issue. The very phrasing of the questions, although we don't have the details of the readings, implies a creative use of the answer-producing process.

There was no canon of cartomancy then, only a local or even unique (ad hoc) use, but the cards provided the basis for a hypothetical narrative ("Does he love me?" "I see another woman" 'Who is she, dammit!" ("I think I know...") - there's a narrative right there), which is no different from what happens today.

Somehow it feels very close to the kind of divination practiced by traditional cultures with tools other than cards. If you cast the Obí (four coconut shells) for example, you only care for the binary result: how many fall mouth up, how many fall mouth down. There is no sense of micro-dramatics as it would be presented in South-African bone casting, for example, in which the proximity and spatial relationship between two or more bones generates narrative information. The same idea of micro-dramatics is present in the kind of readings we do today, in which we seek for relationships/connections between all the cards and we draw narrative conclusions from it. A complex card spread, for example, mirrors the sense of dramatic orientation that diviners would have by paying attention to where their lots fall on the ground: the right means something, the left means something else, far from the client means something, near to the client something different, etc.

I think our readings here are half "simple" and half "complex". The good-suit bad-suit reading is simple, although one wonders why the Jack of Bastones was the card chosen. The 13-card circle seems more complex, and the sentence"the prediction would be made according to the characteristics of the first five cards shown" is unexplained. This is a few generations later than the earliest kinds of readings though, so we should expect a refinement of technique.

But I don’t know if any of that would interest you.

Naturally it does! It seems to me that cards as impetrated omens or narrative machines should be something that is susceptible of being made into a historical narrative (and not just a fantasy one), and that's what I'm trying to do.

EnriqueEnriquez wrote:
The impression one gets from these examples is that the cards were used like ‘beans’, this is, more like objects than like images.

EE

Indeed - I think an argument or a theory could be made that this kind of card reading developed from the bean-o-mancy.

The difference might be important though - the cards didn't have to be labelled, like the beans were. They were already labelled, and gendered - and suited, with good and bad senses attributed to them (as if some beans were already black and some white). This suggests to me that the impetus for using a deck of cards was a response to the images themselves, which already possessed latent narrative.

Such a latent narrative is different from beans, which are indistinguishable from one another without the act of labelling two (or more, possibly) of them.

A further distinction is that the card readings were always in an attitude of order - Margarita de Borja used 5 rows of four cards, Maria Gonzalez her 13 card circle - they were not "cast" out randomly and their position relative in terms of closeness or nearness read (although I can imagine that being done - I know that I used to regard it as significant if a card or several cards fell out while I was shuffling).

[quote="Ross G. R. Caldwell"] I (almost) fully agree. I think this is how card divination should have developed. Like plucking daisy leaves for "he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not..."

All divination ultimately rests on omen-seeking, in response to a question. The other side is when something unusual happens and an omen is taken from it (like a comet or a monstrous birth). The sublety of interpretation, or the depth of the narrative, is a matter of degree rather than kind, in my opinion.

Where I disagree is only a subtlety as well - the definition of "narrative". I think that the proximity of certain images, and the intervening "interferences", would naturally produce narrative - along with the images of the court cards themselves, and including the nature of the suits - malevolent or beneficent. That is, I don't imagine Doña Maria just shuffled a pack of cards, had her client draw one, and then said "yes" or "no". Their meeting, the question, and the answer must have involved a narrative. And the cards that gave the answer must have elicited conversation - the narrative that probably "clarified" the issue. The very phrasing of the questions, although we don't have the details of the readings, implies a creative use of the answer-producing process.

There was no canon of cartomancy then, only a local or even unique (ad hoc) use, but the cards provided the basis for a hypothetical narrative ("Does he love me?" "I see another woman" 'Who is she, dammit!" ("I think I know...") - there's a narrative right there), which is no different from what happens today.[quote]

Yes, I agree. I wasn’t taking into consideration the narratives of the whole process, the divinatory relationship, between reader and client, but speaking from a technical point of view about how much information was extracted from the oracle itself. (On a related note, the simpler the system, the stronger the reader must be. The reader has to create the proper ambient and set the proper expectations in order for these ‘yes’ ‘no’ answer to have the desired impact. In a way, the less elements you have to work with, the better storyteller you have to be to craft the narrative).

As an afterthought I think that my post may have sounded as judgmental when it wasn’t. I wasn’t criticism the quality of the system but pointing out that it had an almost ‘objective’ quality in that the cards where used as objects, not necessarily as images.

[quote="Ross G. R. Caldwell"] I think our readings here are half "simple" and half "complex". The good-suit bad-suit reading is simple, although one wonders why the Jack of Bastones was the card chosen. The 13-card circle seems more complex, and the sentence"the prediction would be made according to the characteristics of the first five cards shown" is unexplained. This is a few generations later than the earliest kinds of readings though, so we should expect a refinement of technique. [quote]

Ah! Yes! These accounts are somehow confusing, it seems as if something is missing or was left out of the description. The same thing happens with African divination. Some times the systems seem non-systemic or discombobulated, and I know that this happens because these are oral traditions in which information is given by bits over a long period of training. You really need to invest time to get the whole picture. Here, it also feels that the description accounts for what the writer observed or was told in that precise moment. But the cartomancer may/must have had a more comprehensive understanding of what is meant by ‘the first five cards’, or why thy chose the Jack of Bastos and not any other card. Cartomancy, at that point, had to have been an oral tradition too, if it wasn’t just an improvisational technique.